Russia’s Cruellest Month

Every August, Russians wait for history, and they are rarely disappointed. On August 31, 1996, Russia wrapped up its disastrous first war against the breakaway Chechen Republic. The ceasefire wouldn’t last long, because exactly three years later, on August 31, 1999, a bomb ripped through a Moscow shopping mall, killing one and injuring forty. It would be the first of five bombings—and hundreds of casualties—and it would trigger the second, still somewhat unfinished war in the region. On August 17, 1998, the Russian government devalued the ruble and defaulted on its debt, ushering in a long and painful economic crisis. On August 12, 2000, the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea. While Moscow tried to cover up the disaster, everyone on board died. (“It sank,” Vladimir Putin said when Larry King asked him what happened.) On August 8, 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia, an unthinkable scenario given the twentieth-century love affair between the two Soviet republics. Last August, much of Russia’s forests caught fire, and a thick blanket of pungent smoke covered Moscow for days, which, along with the anomalous heat, killed off many of the city’s elderly. Something catastrophic happens almost every year. It’s no wonder that Wikipedia has an entry for Russia’s August Curse. October and February, the months of the Revolutions, were once the notorious months, but, in post-Soviet Russia, August has trumped them all.

So far this year, August has been mercifully disaster-free. Instead, Russians are left to ponder the biggest August event of them all, the very event that launched the Curse twenty years ago: the attempted coup d’etat by hardliner Communists on August 19, 1991. On that day, a gang led by the head of the K.G.B., the Soviet defense minister, and the Russian Vice-President Gennady Yanaev formed an Emergency Committee and trapped Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the Soviet Union, at his residence in the Crimea. (August is also the time when Russians, perhaps not coincidentally, go on vacation.) Fearing that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse (it was) and that Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian President, was pushing the process along (he was), the K.G.B. cut off all communication to the dacha, ordered two hundred and fifty thousand pairs of handcuffs to deal with the mounting protests in Moscow, and sent tanks and special forces into the city. The attempted coup failed peacefully, and that was the first nail in the coffin of the U.S.S.R. Four months later, on Christmas Day, the Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor went up in its place.

It was a momentous day, a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism, of peaceful protest over tanks and guns, of American values over the latent evil of the Soviet system. Yeltsin was the hero, the knight who mounted a tank and called on his people to resist the reactionary forces of Communism. In the coup’s aftermath, Yeltsin scored a nearly sixty-per-cent approval rating, a number registered by the new science of polling Russians’ opinions. And the victory, people felt, belonged to them: fifty-seven per cent of respondents said that “the people’s resistance” was the primary reason for the failure of the coup.

It’s been downhill from there. Poor Yeltsin’s approval rating never got above a third, and he ended his presidency, in December, 1999, with ninety per cent of his countrymen disapproving of him. By 1994, only seven per cent would see the events of August, 1991, as the victory of democracy, while fifty-three per cent would see it as “just another struggle for power among the higher echelons of the state”—which is how Russians have viewed any goings on behind the walls of the Kremlin. Just three years after the failed coup delivered the mortal wound to the Soviet behemoth, twenty-seven per cent of Russians would see it as “a tragic event, which had fatal consequences for the country and the people.” Today, that number stands at thirty-nine per cent. Half of today’s Russians think that, starting on that day, the country began its inexorable course in the wrong direction.

Hard to blame them, really: since that fateful day, Russia has spent twenty years trying to chart a course out of a past that didn’t bode too well for its future. It hasn’t helped, of course, that the country decided not to deal with its past at all, thereby allowing certain abuses and mistakes to repeat themselves in ever more absurd reincarnations. It has gone through several severe economic crises—the last of which hit about two weeks too late, on September 15, 2008. These have repeatedly wiped out the savings of millions, a phenomenon from which Russians have learned one lesson: spend, spend, spend. Living conditions deteriorated, birth rates plummeted, able-bodied men dropped like flies. Russia went through a period of the rapacious capitalism of pyramid schemes and robber-baron oligarchy, and it went through a wildly corrupt process of privatizing Soviet property. This cleaved society into a Bolshevik caricature of capitalism: extreme Porsches and extreme poverty.

Politically, the country zigged and zagged—from too many parties, in the early nineties, to one meaningless party today—but the vector has generally steered Russia toward the centralization of power in the hands of one strong leader: Vladimir Putin. How did this happen? Despite the myriad mistakes of the first post-Soviet decade, that period did see the beginnings of a free and vibrant media, and some real, contentious politicking. To eliminate this, Putin surgically marginalized any opposition and created his own nomenklatura. For the rest, he wove a useful myth of “stability,” that special brand of happiness that only he—and stratospheric oil prices—could provide. Not surprisingly, the dark image of the nineties came from Putin’s spinmeisters, who have produced a catchy, oft-repeated meme: “likhie devyanostye.” It’s a phrase that means “the carefree nineties,” but to a Russian it evokes chaos, violence, self-destruction, and lawlessness. It is, in other words, the total opposite of Putin.

And that’s where the psychological part of the history comes in. Putin, who had his K.G.B. career broken off in full bloom by the events of August, 1991, still has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being one of the soldiers who lost the Cold War, and his eleven-year reign has had a strong element of Soviet kitsch: he restored the Soviet national anthem, promoted Stalin as “an effective manager,” and repeatedly bemoaned the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. Increasingly, his party, United Russia, has come to resemble the party he served as a young man and the party that tried to take back the reins in August, 1991: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

If you are a Russian under twenty years old, Putin has been your leader for over half of your life. When a man like that rules your country and its media and its textbooks for most of the time you’ve been alive, you’re bound not to know much about the event that was both the worst and best thing that ever happened to him.

And so it is. According to a state-owned pollster, if you are a Russian between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, fifty-five per cent of you will draw an utter blank when asked to evaluate the significance of August 19, 1991. Seven per cent of you will say that Gorbachev was one of those who defended Russia from the putsch, which isn’t quite true, but it doesn’t really matter since sixty-eight per cent won’t be able to name a single name, which makes saying “Gorbachev” not half bad.

And if you’re an older Russian, say, thirty-five and up, you’ll be pretty evenly split among three camps: the ones who see August, 1991, as a tragedy; the ones who see it as “just another struggle for power among the higher echelons of the state”; and the ones who can say nothing at all. Which, if you’ve lived through twenty Augusts in the new Russia, is not half bad either.